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BGonline.org Forums
A made-up game to illustrate some points about skill and luck
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: A made-up game to illustrate some points about skill and luck (Bob Koca)
Date: Tuesday, 27 January 2015, at 12:14 a.m.
Bob Koca wrote:
Should actual performance on the FT relative to FT% parameter be part of the luck also?
This is a question that I have debated at length with Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias, two of the authors of the excellent book Characteristics of Games. They would say yes to your question. For them, any kind of randomness in a game counts as "luck." Recently, Chuck pointed out that Robertie has argued that chess is "probabilistic," which Garfield and Elias would phrase as, "there is luck in chess."
However, my answer to your question is no. I'd say that the analogous question in backgammon would be, if I played a match and got a lot of easy decisions so that my error rate was much lower than it usually is, should I count that as "luck"? Colloquially, "luck" means a lot of different things, and you could argue that indeed, I was lucky to get a lot of decisions that I understood well. But this isn't where we usually draw the line between luck and skill in backgammon. (Now, in basketball, you might be tempted to say that variation in free-throw performance is not the same as variation in backgammon error rate from match to match, because you're faced with the same task each time in basketball. But I would argue that the two situations are not really that different. In backgammon, you can approximately model a decision you're confronted with as a random sample from your mind, with better-trained players giving better average performance; in basketball, the physical factors are more mysterious, but something is varying from throw to throw, and it again can be modeled as a random sample from your body, with better-trained bodies yielding better average performance.)
My view is that in a game like backgammon or in a game like this made-up game, it is conceptually clearer to use "luck" to refer to the randomness that is "systemic," i.e., designed into the game as a random feature that it would be "cheating" to try to manipulate in your favor. Variation in the part of the game that you are supposed to try to control by training and practice is, in my view, better treated separately as belonging to the "skill" side of the equation, rather than commingled with "luck." In response to Robertie's observation, I would agree that chess is "probabilistic," but prefer to phrase this as "skill can and should be modeled probabilistically" rather than as "there is luck in chess."
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